In the mail order pharmacy industry there exists a need to improve the quality and efficiency of processing medical prescriptions. The mail order pharmacy industry receives a tremendous number of orders on a daily basis, and it is not uncommon to receive 250,000 to 275,000 prescriptions within a single week per pharmacy location. Typically medical prescriptions must be filled in a very time efficient manner. Further, because errors in a prescription reaching a patient could be life threatening, a high level of quality control needs to be maintained throughout the entire prescription filling process.
The orders received from patients are frequently not in a condition to be filled directly without any additional processing. For instance, a prescription may be unreadable due to the illegible penmanship of the prescriber. Other conditions that impede the turnaround time of an order include, for example, a missing benefit plan membership number or the wrong or invalid benefit plan membership number; resolving any drug interactions a new prescription may present when taken with an existing patient condition or medication regime; the payment is missing; critical patient information is missing; the prescription is not covered by a patient's benefit's plan; and incorrect dosage or other dosage or usage inconsistencies. To resolve any of the above examples frequently requires the pharmacist or other technician working to fill the prescription to contact, for example, the prescriber, the patient, the member, the client or combinations thereof.
Presently, the pharmacy industry uses the physical paper order documents through the prescription filling process to process prescriptions. Reliance on the physical paper documentation is cumbersome and results in prescription processing delays. Under the current pharmacy model, as the orders for prescriptions come in they are reviewed and are assigned to a pan. A pan is a physical tray on which all the order documents are placed. Pans are typically color coded to correspond to each day of the week or some other such chronology related to order of receipt of an order. So for instance, if an order is received and opened on a Monday it would be placed in a red tray, which in this example is the Monday tray. To resolve any of the errors, questions, and/or conditions associated with an order may require a contact to the prescriber, the patient, the member, the client or combinations thereof. The prescriber is the individual responsible for writing the prescription contained in an order and is typically a medical doctor. The member is the individual that holds the benefit's plan. The patient can be a member but may instead be an individual named by the member, such as a family member, and covered by the benefit's plan. The client pays the bill in whole or in part associated with the drug and an administration fee to the mail order pharmacy and is typically the company or individual responsible for providing the benefit's plan to the member. For instance, if a prescription requires a call to the prescriber because the drug dosage is illegible, an attempt to contact the prescriber is made. If the attempt to contact the prescriber fails, a message may be left with the prescriber's office. When the prescriber returns the call the prescriber is typically subject to some wait time while the pharmacist or other technician goes through stacks of pans to locate the corresponding order. The resultant wait time typically results in some frustration on the part of the prescriber.
The current paper-based pharmacy system also suffers from the inability to locate the precise location of any one order. For instance, if a patient calls the pharmacy requesting an update on their order or if the patient needs to revise where the order is to be shipped, it is cumbersome to locate the order in an efficient manner that satisfies the patient. The lag time between when a patient calls to inquire about their prescription and when the order is located creates an ill impression of the pharmacy in the mind of the patient.
Another aspect of the present mail order pharmacy methods that create the misimpression that the pharmacy is slow to process orders results from the disparate geography of the patient and pharmacy. For example, if the mail order pharmacy is located in Seattle, Wash. and the patient is located in New York, N.Y. several days are lost just in order transit time—a few days to Seattle and a few additional days from Seattle to New York. It would be advantageous to be able to have the prescription mailed for processing to a pharmacy closer to New York, such as somewhere in New Jersey, to cut down on the mail transit time.
Furthermore, the present methods of mail order pharmacies cannot obtain intelligence on the health or state of the various system components involved in processing orders. More particularly, current methods are unable to provide real-time system state information.
Accordingly, we have determined an improvement upon the current system would provide real time state information regarding the condition of the system or any subcomponent of the system, the ability to locate an order at any time and in any location within the processing process, and the ability to process orders in locations distinct from the dispensing pharmacy.